Читать книгу Rebecca Temple Mysteries 3-Book Bundle - Sylvia Maultash Warsh - Страница 16

Rebecca drove to her new office after dark for the first time. Beverley Street, empty at that hour but for the parked cars, had taken on a different cast. The stillness, the Victorian calm of the houses, suddenly seemed like a predator waiting. She pulled into the parking lot behind the building and killed the ignition. There was an overhead lamp fixed to the brick wall, illuminating the asphalt. Streetlights ranged along Beverley and D’ Arcy in high arcs but in her rear-view mirror she saw only shadows stretched between the disparate pools of light.

Across D’ Arcy Street the old brick schoolhouse floated behind a deep mantle of shade thrown by the mature spruce trees in the yard. The school had gone through several incarnations in its long life. Now it was an alternative high school. She wondered how tall those spruce trees had been when David attended Hebrew school there some thirty years earlier. The vision of a young David playing catch in the yard had often comforted her when she looked out the examining room window upstairs. But now, from street level, night and the memory of Mrs. Kochinsky’s crumpled body transformed the corner into a bog.

She rifled through her purse in the dark until she found her keys. Only then did she step out of the car. She knew the fear, the uncertainty, would stay with her until she managed to chase it out one day, but at the moment she couldn’t see her way clear to it. She hurried toward the back door, throwing the shadowy bog behind her a cautious glance.

She unlocked it and searched for a light switch on the wall before venturing inside. It wasn’t there. Stepping tentatively into the dark hall, she felt her way along the door frame without success. Finally she reached across to the opposite wall and flicked on the switch. The emptiness of the hall she encountered daily was suddenly foreign to her.

As she walked briskly along the corridor and up the stairs to her office, she wondered why this couldn’t have waited till morning. But she knew why. It wasn’t just giving the file to Wanless. She wanted to look something up for herself. That voice from the past. She wanted to know why it was important.

She fitted the key into her door and opened it. Suddenly she stopped. A muffled sound reached her from the downstairs hall. She told herself to get a grip. Maybe it was just an echo of her opening the office door in the empty building.

She found Mrs. Kochinsky’s file in the cabinet and sat down near Iris’ desk. Reading through her notes on the woman’s visit last week, Rebecca tried to piece together scraps of information like a jigsaw. According to Mrs. Kochinsky, a few days before the visit she had received a startling phone call from a distant cousin. Startling, it seemed to Rebecca (she could only guess since the woman’s explanations were often non-linear and hard to follow) because the cousin had till then communicated only through widely spaced letters over the years. They had met only once, growing up in different parts of Poland. He survived the war, a young teenager at the time, and moved to the States. All this Rebecca gleaned from the most obscure of references in her notes.

She could see from her scribbled notes yesterday that there had been some confusion about why Mrs. Kochinsky had come downtown to shop instead of staying on Eglinton Avenue where she felt safe. What had she said? My cousin from U.S. coming. He ask me to shop so I looking around. Something like that. But there had been a sense of urgency about the shopping Rebecca couldn’t reconstruct or perhaps didn’t understand to begin with. All she knew was that Mrs. Kochinsky had been shopping when she’d been badly frightened. The man who was going to kill her, she had said. But why was he going to kill her? It had always been so obvious to Mrs. Kochinsky. The people who were after her didn’t need reasons. This gap in the logic had led Rebecca to her diagnosis of paranoia. Not once, but often. And yet the woman was dead.

Rebecca closed her eyes and conjured up Mrs. Kochinsky sitting across from her. The Greta Garbo face mouthed the words but no sound came forth. Her grey-brown hair trembled with effort. Rebecca watched the mouth, willing it to speak, but it was no use. Suddenly the old woman’s head turned dolefully toward the door and Rebecca opened her eyes. She had definitely heard something downstairs.

Treading softly to the office door, she turned the knob without a sound. The light was still on in the hall downstairs. She listened with the door open a crack. All at once a shadow materialized on the lighted wall. Her nerves shot to the surface. Keep calm, she thought. It must be Dr. Arons coming back for something. She held her breath and watched. The shadow crept closer. Why would Dr. Arons aim at stealth? She would just saunter in and go to her office door. The shadow grew larger on the wall, then stopped. It was waiting, listening. Suddenly the shadow moved and the light in the hall went out. It wasn’t Dr. Arons.